Teen Vaping Not Leading to Cigarette Smoking

A new study from Georgetown University Comprehensive Cancer Center suggests that we have passed the ‘tipping point’ and vaping is not driving teens to cigarettes.

Authors of the study insist that if more teens were going to adopt regular cigarettes, it would have happened at the 2014 ‘tipping point’ rather than teenage smoking declining even more rapidly, as it has thus far. Back in 2013, cigarettes were almost three times more popular for high school students than vaping was.

By 2015, 2.39 teenagers had vaped and just 1.37 million had smoked combustible cigarettes in the past year.

The latest research suggests that the tipping point for teen vapers to transition to the combustible cigarettes and smoking has just continued to fall faster and faster out of fashion among American youth.

Researchers looked at data on how much 15- to 25-year-olds vaped or smoked between 2004 and 2017 and found that vaping did not have a huge following in 2013, but its popularity surged in 2014, according to self-reported data on young peoples’ usage. E-cigarette sales surged around the same time, too, suggesting to the research team that this was the critical adoption period, which they dubbed the tipping point.

On the other hand, cigarettes’ popularity decline really kicked into high gear in 2013, which, as the researchers point out, coincides with the e-cig surge for 18- to 21-year-olds.

This led the researchers to assert that if e-cigs were being so widely adopted and so significantly pushed young Americans toward cigarettes, we already would have seen cigarette smoking take an upward turn, or at least for its decline to slow.

‘While caution is warranted in interpreting our findings, they paint a consistent picture of accelerated reductions in youth and young adult smoking prevalence as vaping became more widespread,’ the researchers wrote.

They also said that ‘if our primary concern is population-level trends in youth and young adult smoking, which we believe is appropriate, then vaping has not shown to be a serious cause for concern ... and may be playing a contributing role to the recent steep declines in young adult smoking.’